"Why are the first English Romantic poets so endlessly
fascinating? For one thing, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
all represent a radical break with the past and a headlong
embrace of revolutionary ideas and ideals. In fact, speaking
of the French Revolution, Wordsworth wrote that "Bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive" because of the new possibilities people
felt for freedom and a liberation from the hidebound past.
Blake struck a similar note in one of his "Proverbs of Hell"
(a work that prefigures Freud by almost a century): "The road of excess
leads to palace of wisdom." Join Professor Alan Helms, Rev. Kim,
and the Ancient Mariner for an exploration into some of the seminal
work of three of the greatest of English-language poets.
It's true what Colerdige wrote:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.